Steve Souders’ tech talk on writing fast code

This guy is my hero on web performance technique, so I was real happy when this video was published recently in googletechtalks YouTube channel (check out the channel, it has many, many other interesting videos).

In this tech talk, he built up upon the previous tech talk (which I happened to watch live, but could not find it online) and talk about how you can take advantage of parallel Javascript downloads while maintaining any coupling you have between external scripts and inline scripts that you have. One of the techniques involve a modification of John Resig’s degrading script tags. He also mentioned problems with iframe preventing onload events to be fired earlier. Finally, he made clear how you could flush your data early to ensure that you utilize chunked transfer. The last bit was particularly interesting. It has been in my mind recently and I have experimented quite a bit with PHP to perform this. Soon I’m going to try to figure out whether a Python (non-Apache) web server can perform similarly (I believe so). I already wrote a testing web server (based on HttpServer class).

In PHP/Apache case, there were quite a few difficulties in making sure that chunked transfer is performed. One is to make sure that you have enough data (and specifically flush PHP output buffering otherwise). Another involves figuring out Apache’s limitation on sending a single chunk (you have to have enough data before Apache agree to push these data; worse still, if you activate gzipping, the data must exceed the minimum gzip window). Of course, the most interesting problems would be to figure out how to structure the page to ensure that you get the most out of chunked transfer. In another word, you would want to transfer as much dumb data (that can be generated real fast) as possible to utilize the time taken for the server to generate the difficult content as efficiently as possible (at that time, the browser can start downloading CSS, some images, and maybe some Javascript). Also note that the browser will start partial rendering of the page; however, the rest of the page will only be rendered when the rest of the data comes (which can be very long when you’re unlucky). So you need to make sure that the page renders fine with partial data.

Souders’ talk revealed several more considerations that escape my own experiments in this. One is that some proxy server will buffer chunked transfer; the effect of which is that the user will get the entire page in a single monolithic transfer. Also, some browsers (Chrome and Safari) will not start partial render unless there’s enough data (2KB for Chrome, and 1KB for Safari).

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By Shards

This is another of my experiment, hopefully not a short-lived one. I've attempted to keep a blog in the past and the longest attempt ran for 2 years. This is my first technical blog. Comments are welcomes, and you can contact me at shards 'et' webpage domain (proudly powered by GMail).